“But you know what they say, Mother. You’ve got to make an effort. That’s how you get ahead in life. If you set your mind to it, you really can change your God-given nature. That’s what old people tell us.”
“What?! Change what you are fated to be? That’s not possible. The letters of the Javanese alphabet hang below the lines on a page. We Javanese are like those letters. We depend on what’s above us. Our duty is to obey and be true to what we are.”
“Mother . . . that’s only for people who give up easily. Not like us . . . we’ve got to wring all we can from ourselves. We have an obligation to change our circumstances. That’s all Father is doing. It’s not a sin.”
“But your father has taken this too far. He’s gone ahead and removed that mole of his—that beauty spot—and look what’s happened? Now he attracts all these flies. Who’s to blame for that? Eh? You tell me! Erruugh . . . all those flies . . . it’s appalling. They’re revolting!”
Her son, Mas Habib Dewa, was silent. He considered his answer carefully. His mother certainly had her husband in her sights. All because of that beauty spot on his lip, apparently. She felt that by getting rid of it, her husband—Pak Tunjung Jenar—had not done the right thing.
She thought the beauty spot—sitting black and fat on his lip—had been a gift from God. He should have left it alone. There was no need to have it removed. For one thing, she objected to the cost of the operation, even though Pak Tunjung Jenar had paid for it without pinching money from the household budget. Who knows where he had found the money, but somehow, simply by doing without, he had scraped together enough. More to the point, the beauty spot was a witness to history . . . their history as a couple. When they were still young, she had been attracted to Pak Tunjung because she found the black spot cute. And it made people look twice.
But for Pak Tunjung it was an irritation. It brought bad luck. And it simply wasn’t aesthetically nice to have a black spot stuck on his lip. It interfered with his speech. After all, talking was Pak Tunjung’s main vocation. It was something he had to do.
He had the impression the black spot was getting bigger, every month, every week, even from day to day. That’s why, eventually, he quietly made a decision. Secretly he slipped off overseas for an operation to remove it. Unfortunately, when he got back, he brought a plague of flies with him.
“These flies,” said his wife, “they seem to be threatening us. It’s hard to avoid the little buggers. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were foreign flies, flies that came back with your father last week. They’re so aggressive! They seem to sneak up on you . . . they take you by surprise.”
“Yes, they’re going berserk!” said her son. “I think it’s fair to say they’re violating our human rights. They’re forgetting their place. They’re getting cocky. Look at them, Mother . . . they’re crawling all over Father’s lips. Don’t they have any respect?! It’s not only when Dad’s asleep and snoring that they land on his lips. When Dad’s live on TV, there they are, buzzing around him. I’ve seen it myself! They fly past without so much as an ‘excuse me’. It’s very annoying. They’re causing him to mispronounce words. Would you believe, the other day he had a slip of the tongue and said I’m a well-known rat. What he really meant was I’m a well-known bureaucrat. All because of a dumb-ass fly. It was like getting caught napping by a greenhorn reporter. The wrong words came out.”
“What’ll happen when he’s having dinner with high-ranking officials?” his mother trilled. “The flies won’t leave him alone! He’ll have to keep slapping himself on the mouth. Tell your father to take leave from work, or something. Better to do that than be a plaything of flies. There’s no point in me telling him what to do. Your father is different from all those other officials who get pushed around by their wives. He won’t listen to me. And the frustrating thing is, I’ve seen with my own eyes, sometimes it’s those fat green flies that keep buzzing around. It’s just not ethical!”
“That’s right, Mother. If we don’t do something about them, they’ll be a danger to us all.”
“Yes, they will. I’ve been worried about those flies for a while now. I’ve had enough of them. They’re truly screwy. We should buy flypaper, that would fix them. Once they’re stuck to the paper we can destroy it . . . burn it. Huh . . . soup, poop, loop-the-loop . . . they just will not leave us alone.”
Mother and son tried some countermeasures. They spread glue over the house’s air vents to trap the flies. Unfortunately, a number of rats got stuck in it, stuck fast, writhing and twitching until they died and went rotten. The stink filled the sitting room. Whenever Pak Tunjung Jenar invited colleagues to his home to discuss important matters of strategy, they had to hold their noses. The rotting little corpses sent a fetid stench through the house. This only attracted thousands more flies. Pak Tunjung’s guests were always very understanding. They turned around and took their leave. They didn’t want to intrude.
After landing on the corpses of the rats, the flies took off again and headed for Pak Tunjung’s lips. They kept coming, one after another. It was like they were attacking him. As the days passed, they grew in number, getting in the way every time Pak Tunjung opened his mouth. Even more sickening, when they landed on his lips, they would lay eggs, and these produced a cascade of squirming maggots.
“Hey Pak! If those flies keep it up, if they persist with their idiotic behaviour, you should just withdraw, Pak. Don’t try to brazen it out . . . this idea you’ve got of running for president. It’ll be no skin off your nose if you withdraw. Your health is more important than a high position. It’ll be even worse if you actually do it . . . if you really run for president. People will say you’re the nominee of flies. You’ll be a public laughing stock. We don’t need the money anyway. All those perks and allowances from your last period in office . . . it’ll take us twenty-five years to spend it all.”
“Those perks and allowances cost me a lot of sweat. That’s why I’ve got to run again. This time I’m aiming for the top job. I’ve got to have it. I can’t bear to be one of those people that gets kicked around. I’d be trampled down, you can be sure of that. The wounds I carry with me, that I’ve kept under wraps all these years, they’ll be pinched open again. It’ll reopen all those old wounds. They’ll be even more gaping wide than before.”
Pak Tunjung wouldn’t give an inch. He was soaked through, as they say, and it was too late to dry him out. Even if you chained him up, he’d break out and make a run for it. He was totally determined, as totally determined as the full moon.
He indicated to his wife that she was required to help him.
“I’m a human being,” he said. “You don’t expect me to give in to insects, do you? If it turns out those flies keep homing in on me, well, I can lead the nation with a mask on my face. There’s nothing wrong with that . . . it’s perfectly valid and legal.”
His wife nodded, very slowly, without the least flicker of enthusiasm. It was difficult to guess what was passing through her mind. Probably she was just thinking, if my husband wears a steel mask, will the flies still recognize him?
The two of them sucked in very deep breaths.
Then, back came the flies. Thousands of them, all fighting for a place on Pak Tunjung’s lips. In fact, his whole face was crawling with flies.
His wife looked on, more flummoxed than ever.
